It's no secret that GNU/Linux is being used by the Hollywood studios to create block-busters. Pixar is working on OpenSubdiv, a new open source library that implements high performance subdivision surface drawing and evaluation on modern GPU and massively parallel CPU architectures.To demonstrate it at work, Autodesk published a video where they featured special guests, Bill Polson, Dirk Van Gelder, Manuel Kraemer, Takahito Tejima, David G. Yu and Dale Ruffolo, from Pixar Animation Studios' GPU team to show how real time display of subdivision surfaces helps artists be more productive, and how this code is open source and engineered for ease of integration.

What ever happened to Pixars own software? I remember way back in the 90's Pixar wrote their own software for modeling, and it was extremely advanced for its time it was called render man or something else back then?

I had a intro to 3D modeling / rendering book back in the 90's and it had a whole chapter devoted to how Pixar was going to release this ultra advanced 3D package... never happened... what happened was they went to making movies instead of software.. the chapter even showed screenshots of their software